It is one of the distinctive features of Roman thought that there are few statements of a political theory. A Roman conception of politics emerges, instead, through a cumulation of profiles. In describing the task of the Roman historian in writing of the "kinds of lives our ancestors live," Livy suggests, "in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see; and in that record you can find for yourself and your country both examples and warnings; fine things to take as models, base things, rotten through and through, to avoid." The history that Livy is referring to is a history of individuals rather than of political processes and institutions. These are not biographies, in the modern sense of the term, but profiles meant to capture particular moments in a life. Though the perspectives of the likes of...